Theoretical and empirical studies on "unidentified child abuse victims" : prevalence and psychological influences

1.调查了大学生中“不明身份虐待儿童”(CA)受害者的患病率，并考察了CA对大学生心理适应(分离、抑郁、自尊)的影响。通过本研究，我们编制了《多形式虐待儿童问卷》(MCAI)。2.将其应用于家庭中受虐待儿童和与大学生的融合效度，检验了该量表的临床效度。我们编制了适用于1-3岁和4-5岁儿童的《虐待儿童症状问卷》。然后，我们进行了一项大规模的研究，要求教师在F州3个市的日托中心为他们的孩子填写清单，以调查不明身份受虐儿童的患病率。根据我们的研究结果，我们估计在可以被识别为“身份不明的被虐待儿童”的中心中，大约有1.5%的儿童没有被报告给PC Agencies。4.我们探索性地调查了托儿所教师难以报告他们在中心发现的被虐待儿童的原因，5.通过让大学生回顾他们在托儿所期间的经历，我们考察了托儿所教师虐待行为的发生率。6.我们调查了大型精神病院门诊患者中身份不明的虐待儿童受害者的患病率。7.为了探索普通人在报告虐待儿童方面可能遇到困难的可能原因，我们通过让专业人员和非专业人员(包括大学生和管家)在虐待儿童的专业知识方面的差异，让他们评估MCAI中虐待行为的严重程度。我们发现，与非专业人士相比，专业人士认为虐待行为没有那么严重。

In this project, we conducted the following studies during the period of 3 years :1.We investigated the prevalence of "unidentified child abuse (CA) victims' in college students and examined influences of CA on their psychological adjustment (dissociation, depression, self-esteem). Through this study, we developed "Multi-form Child Abuse Inventory (MCAI)."2.We tested clinical validity of MCAI by applying it to abused children in home and convergent validities with college students. It was shown to have good validities.3.We developed "Child Abuse Symptom Inventories" for 1-3 and 4-5 year olds. Then, we conducted a large-scale study, by asking teachers to file out the inventories for their children in daycare centers in 3 cities of Prefecture F, in order to investigate the prevalence of unidentified abused children. Based on our findings, we estimated about 1.5% of children in centers that can be identified as "unidentified abused children" who have not been reported to PC Agencies.4.We exploratorily investigated reasons of daycare-center teachers having difficulties of reporting abused children whom they found in their centers, by qualitatively analyzing their responses to open-ended questionnaire.5.We examined the prevalence of abusive acts committed by daycare-center teachers by asking college students to retrospectively report their experiences while in centers as a child.6.We examined the prevalence of unidentified child abuse victims in outpatients of a large-scale psychiatric hospital.7.To explore possible causes of the difficulties that regular people might experience for reporting abused children, we examined differences among professionals vs. non-professionals (14 occupations, including college students and housekeepers) in terms of expertise of child abuse, by asking them to evaluate the degree of severity of abusive acts in MCAI. We found that professionals perceive abusive acts as less abusive than non-professional people.